The Replacements

by David Putnam

  I waited for the right answer.

  “Okay, their boss is a real ballbuster and two agents on the team are off the grid, while the others cover their shifts. They’re out there trying to track down their stuff so they won’t have to formally report it to the ballbuster. Back in the day, you and I would have done the same thing. These guys aren’t like the regular FBI. They’re okay.”

  “You go get the coffee. I’ll think on our case in the shower and have it solved by the time you get back.”

  He laughed. “You have any cash?”

  “Come on?”

  “No, really, I’m a little tapped out until next payday.”

  I pulled out a money clip, peeled off three twenties, and handed it to him.

  He handed back two twenties. “No man, I said coffee, not the buffet at the Hilton.”

  Thirty-five minutes later, we rolled out of the parking lot in the T-Bird and onto Valley Boulevard. I opened the cup of coffee and sipped it. Mack handed me a paper bag. He’d picked up four Sno Balls. When I saw them, my stomach gave a little lurch. I needed some protein, not more sugar. “Can you drive through someplace and get me something healthy, like a fried egg sandwich with some of those deep-fried hash browns?”

  I might as well live it up. When I returned to San José, Costa Rica, Marie would put me back on vegetables and fish.

  Mack held up a Sno Ball. “You had these last night, I thought you liked ’em.”

  “Get back on the freeway and head east to Yucca Valley.”

  Mack shrugged. With his free hand, he tore open the Sno Balls and stuck half of one in his mouth and mumbled, “This one of those leads we’re going to track down?”

  I nodded. From Valley he turned south on Citrus and pulled into an independent taco place called Albertos. “This okay?”

  Ten minutes later we hit the freeway, with the fat “kitchen sink” burrito in both hands. The beast had everything but the kitchen sink in it, double wrapped in tortillas, and large enough for two men and a boy. I took the first bite, closed my eyes, and savored the warm greasy taste.

  I hadn’t noticed the heat the day before. This was summer in SoCal and, at seven in the morning, the warm air blew in the open windows. In less than twenty minutes’ time, we reached Whitewater, where windmills, scattered for miles across desert hilltops, rotated slowly in a warm, lazy breeze. I could only finish off a third of the burrito before my stomach surrendered. Too bad—the greasy food tasted fantastic and was now determined to make me sleepy. “Okay,” I said, “tell me about this Karl Drago thing.”

  Mack shook his head. “First, tell me where we’re goin’. Why Yucca Valley?”

  “Barbara told me the suspect was Jonas Mabry.”

  “Yeah, we know that already, and we can’t find him. You know where he is? Is he in Yucca Valley?”

  “How do you guys know it’s Mabry? Did you get confirmation on the note? How do you know for sure?”

  “You’re not going to answer any of my questions, are you?”

  We were both alpha dominants vying for who would be in control of this little two-man operation, a game neither of us would win. The last time we’d worked together, I’d been in custody and in handcuffs as he drove us around searching for the murderer Ruben the Cuban. The circumstances differed this time. I waited for him to give in.

  He finally smiled. “Both girls were snatched right out of their homes without one iota of evidence left behind. Nothing.

  “Before the crime was discovered, and right after it happened, an LASO deputy made a car stop on a green Ford Escort a few blocks from the location. The driver handed the deputy ID in the name of Alex Jessups, City of Industry. A residence not all that far away from where Jessups was stopped. The car was immaculate, without one mechanical violation. The deputy filled out a field interrogation card and sent Jessups on his way. At the time, no one put it together. Later, after we got the traffic cam photo from the Montclair snatch, we figured Elena Cortez was in the trunk when the stop had been made.

  “With Sandy Williams, the City of Montclair has a state-of-the-art traffic control system with cameras at every intersection. Three blocks from Sandy’s house, at Central and Buena Vista, we got lucky. The cam caught the same green Escort. They isolated and enhanced the driver. They entered the photo in the facial recognition system and didn’t get a hit. Then they tried it the old way and made copies and sent them around to every law enforcement agency. A parole agent in El Monte recognized Jonas Mabry.”

  Every time someone said that name it took a little chunk out of me. Could I have saved these two little girls all this hardship had I merely acted like a big brother to Jonas Mabry all those years ago? “He’s on parole?” I didn’t need to ask.

  “Yeah, twenty-five years old and he’s been to the joint twice. First time for two-to-four, out in four. The second time he got the aggravated term five-to-ten. He did seven.”

  My throat turned dry and made speaking difficult. “What for? What did he do his time for?”

  “Violence. Four cases, the first two he was given probation. First incident, age twelve, he stabbed his foster father with a screwdriver he’d sharpened for just that purpose. Got his foster father five times quick, before the father turned around and clocked him, knocked little Jonas out.”

  “Do you have the file?”

  “Sure, a copy’s on the backseat.”

  “Why didn’t you say so?”

  “Take it easy, big fella. Sounds like you haven’t had enough sleep.”

  “Sorry.” I reached in the backseat and found a fat manila folder under a blue windbreaker. I pulled it up front and set it on my lap.

  Before I opened it and got started, I needed to call Marie. I needed to hear her voice.

  Mack said, “I doubt if you’re going to find anything in there. A dozen detectives from three agencies have been through it, and every possible lead was run down. Now, you going to tell me why we’re going to Yucca Valley?”

  “Jonas Mabry’s father lives out there.”

  Mack veered across two lanes, going over the painted divider to make the off ramp.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Old man Mabry’s dead. It’s in the file.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  We sat on the off ramp as cars zipped by. The file on my lap resembled a murder book in a homicide investigation, but this one was for the kidnappings. All the supplemental reports to the investigation had been added, updated, and, within the last twelve hours, collated and indexed. I flipped to the tab marked “Jonas Mabry.”

  I read while Mack talked. “Mark Wayne, a box boy at the Mayfair Market, discovered Micah Mabry dead behind the wheel in the grocery store’s parking lot in Montclair.

  “Micah had dropped out of society and had been invisible for years. We couldn’t find any property in his name, he didn’t have a driver’s license, no history in Social Security, which means he did not have a legal job. Nothing. A ghost.”

  It happened that way with folks who witnessed something so heinous that their minds can’t comprehend life’s complex and sometimes violent ways. He’d merely retracted from life, pulled away, and lived on the fringe of society.

  “What now, oh great Carnac?” asked Mack.

  “Keep going. Head out to Yucca Valley.”

  He jerked his head to the left to check for an opening in traffic. “Bruno, that’s a long damn way to go for nothing. What’s out there in that pisshole of a desert?”

  “Maybe nothing, but we got nothing.”

  From the beginning, I had tried to forget about Micah, his family, and their house. All those years ago. Now, when his name had come up again, the time frame wasn’t clear in my head. I’d gotten a postcard in the mail maybe two years after the event. The standard plain white card came to the Sheriff’s main headquarters, and interoffice forwarded it onto Violent Crimes Division. In crooked little letters from a shaky hand, the card read:

  I never had a chance to properly thank you. Please c
ome and see me. Soon. It’s real important.

  Micah Mabry

  The return address: 12635 Old Woman Springs Road, Landers, California.

  All those years ago, I fought for weeks whether to go or not to go. The card remained on my clipboard in plain view, where I couldn’t help but see it all day at work. At night, the card brought back nightmares of dead children in an ugly house that bled.

  Without trying, I became obsessed. I didn’t want to go. I wouldn’t go under any circumstance. One night after the Violent Crimes Team took down a bank robbery in progress, we conducted our usual victory dance with lots of beer in the closest store parking lot. I drank more than normal and shouldn’t have been driving. I drove in a trance, but snapped out of it as I transitioned from the 10 Freeway onto Highway 62, subconsciously making the drive to the desert. I checked the map book and found Landers, a little no-account town outside a larger one called Yucca Valley. I drove out Old Woman Springs Road as the sun peeked over the horizon to paint the desert hot in yellows and oranges. For as far as the eye could see, Landers and Johnson Valley rolled in empty desert, spotted with sage and Joshua trees and salt cedar and small, one-room shacks. I stopped a quarter mile down the dirt road and watched with binoculars.

  Parked out in front of Micah Mabry’s shack was a broken-down GMC pickup, the black and gray paint splotched and ruined from the unrelenting desert sun. I didn’t put my Toyota Camry in park and kept my foot on the brake, ready to flee at any moment. I watched a long time until the muscles in my foot cramped, the car interior turned claustrophobic, and the sides and roof closed in. Still, I waited. Off in the corner of my mind, I realized I had a subpoena for court and was already late. Robby would be looking for me, calling, sending a cop car by my house to wake me up. When that didn’t work, Robby would check the jails for a drunk driver. Then the hospitals.

  And, still, I waited.

  Sweat rolled down into my eyes, burning. I changed feet on the brake over and over. I tried to analyze why I didn’t want to see him and came up with the only logical reason: I didn’t want a reminder of what he and I had gone through. I didn’t want images so difficult to suppress, again laid bare to raw, emotional wounds.

  Three hours into my vigil, a decrepit old man, slump-shouldered, gray hair, eased out the door of the shack. A man without motivation, without spirit, nothing more than an empty husk. I recognized him and received a jolt of an image: this same man on his knees in bloody water holding a dead child as he keened in grief. He’d aged so much in such a short period of time. He’d given up on life and life had not hesitated to run him over.

  My breath came quick. My stomach heaved. I let my foot off the brake and drove away.

  My mind kicked back into reality and my attention returned to the car with Mack. Mack kept his foot on the accelerator, passing all the other cars. They’d found Micah dead in a car about eighteen years after I’d seen him out in front of that shack in the desert. Eighteen years without a spirit was a long time to spend in hell.

  “You read this entire file? The car they found Micah in two years ago, was it a black and gray GMC?” My voice came out in a croak.

  “Don’t remember.”

  I went back into the file and found it. A rental. A cherry-red Rent-a-Wreck Toyota Corolla.

  “He died two years ago of natural causes,” Mack said, “cardiac infarction according to the medical examiner. Positive ID with fingerprints.”

  The man died of a broken heart.

  “Don’t you find it odd that the car was found in a grocery store parking lot in Montclair? The same city Sandy Williams was taken from?”

  Mack took his eyes from the freeway and glanced at me. “Yeah, I guess you’re right. Nobody thought to look into that. It was a natural death, for crying out loud.” He took his foot off the accelerator, looking to change lanes, get off, and turn around to go back to Montclair.

  “No,” I said, “Keep going. We’ve come this far, let’s check it out.” He looked at me again, this time not questioning my judgment, and put his foot back on the gas pedal.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  I took the cell out and dialed Barbara Wicks.

  “What are you doing?” asked Mack.

  “I’m going to get someone working on Micah’s rental car.”

  “We can do that as soon as we finish this fool’s errand out in the desert.”

  Mack still lived by the old team’s doctrine created by Robby, who stole it from the FBI: Don’t show anyone your cards. Don’t give anyone any information or intelligence that will assist them in catching your crook. The Violent Crimes Team cracking the case first had forever remained the number one goal.

  “Good morning, Leon,” Barbara said, with a smile in her voice.

  So, the ‘Leon’ moniker was prearranged.

  “I’m just getting into this case, but I need to have someone track down—”

  “Hold on, let me get a pen,” she said. “Okay, go.”

  “Micah died of natural causes—”

  She cut me off. “We already checked and rechecked that. Autopsy confirmed natural causes and positive ID with fingerprints—two years ago—it has nothing to do with our current situation.”

  The heavy fatigue gnawed down my patience to a ragged nub. I waited.

  “Leon?” she said.

  “Micah died in a car.”

  “And?”

  “In a parking lot in Montclair.”

  “Shit.”

  “Have someone check out the rental car. Go back and see who rented it and get an address.”

  “Right. Son of a bitch. How did we miss that? I’m on it.”

  “It was two years ago, and sometimes the obvious hides in plain sight.”

  She lowered her tone. “Thanks, Bruno. Where are you guys?”

  “It’s probably a dead end, but we’re almost there, so we’re going to check on something. I’ll keep you updated.”

  “And I’ll let you know what this lead turns up.”

  Twenty minutes later, we rode the rolling Old Woman Springs Road with her gentle rise and fall. Mack let me have quiet time as I read some of the thick file. Outside, the passing terrain looked familiar and, at the same time, it didn’t. The last time out here, I’d been too unfocused to take in any permanent landmarks. Until we came to the shack. “Right there, pull in right there.”

  “How do you know? There aren’t any numbers I can see.”

  “That’s Micah’s truck parked out front.” The truck didn’t look as if it had moved in all those years, but it had. Mack zipped in. The undercarriage bounced and squeaked from the uneven dirt. He stopped behind the truck. A cloud of dust caught up and overtook us, turned the light dim for a second. Mack leaned over, opened the glove box, and took out a gun. He tried to give me the blue automatic, a Glock 9mm.

  “No, I’m not going to shoot anyone here.”

  “How do you know?”

  “How can I, if I don’t have a gun?”

  I got out as Mack shoved the extra gun under the seat and followed.

  The stucco on the shack’s exterior walls wore puke beige paint with little cracks turning to fissures that let the wind and cold and heat inside. The desiccated wood door hung on rusted hinges. The one window, thick with dust and grime, didn’t allow visibility in either direction. The door opened before I knocked. An old crone of indeterminate age stood in a faded floral dress, ragged at the hem from dragging the ground. Her hair, wiry gray, stood out at all angles. Her tired eyes didn’t care who visited. She said, “He’s not here. He left a long time ago.”

  My hand instinctively went to the sheriff’s badge on the chain around my neck. Before I could speak, Mack jumped in. “Sheriff’s Department, ma’am, you mind if we ask you a few questions?”

  She stepped out and closed the door behind her. Mack and I looked at each other. Her maneuver was common among crooks who didn’t want their contraband discovered. Or wanted to hide kidnapped children inside. My heart rate increased. Not this
easy, it couldn’t be this easy.

  “Are you talking about Micah Mabry?” I asked.

  “Who else would I be talking about?”

  Mack said, “We’re looking for Jonas.”

  “What’s he done?” she replied.

  “Have you seen him recently?” I asked.

  She looked from Mack back to me. “No, not for ages.”

  Mack started to say something. I held my hand up, stopped him, and asked, “What is your relationship to the Mabrys?”

  “None of your damn business. Get off my property. There’s nothing here for you. I told you he’s not here.”

  I said, “Micah Mabry is dead.”

  She swayed a bit and put a hand out and grabbed the door frame for support. Her voice lost its force, “When…how?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “You didn’t know. He died of natural causes two years ago.”

  “Come in, come in. I need to sit.” She opened the door to a musty dimness the sunlight tried to penetrate. We followed her inside.

  No children watched television or hung out waiting to be rescued. The square room’s naked concrete floor contained a ratty couch, an easy chair, and a swayed, rope-slat bed. The place smelled of cinnamon and sweat. In one corner sat a dorm refrigerator with a hot plate on top. Tidy and organized, the shack held the bare minimum for survival, with nothing left for comfort or luxury. She went over to the easy chair, sat, and rocked and looked off into the distance.

  “Ma’am?” Mack said. His cell rang. He stepped outside to answer it.

  I got down on complaining knees and put my hand on hers. “How long have you and Micah lived here?”

  “Twenty-odd years. Met him walking along the highway with a summer monsoon coming. I stopped for him.” She brought her eyes down to mine. “He wouldn’t take the ride, said he needed the time to walk, said he’d already walked a hundred miles. He looked like he’d come a hundred miles. I told him I lived down the road right here, another ten miles or so, and if he wanted to he could stop to rest and have some water. He looked real bad, about to collapse. Didn’t think he’d make the ten miles. To tell you the truth, I thought he’d walk right off into oblivion.”